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THE COMET'S TAIL

Name: THE COMET'S TAIL
Author: Amy Nawrocki
ISBN: 978-1-947003-61-3

A MEMOIR OF NO MEMORY

by Amy Nawrocki ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018

A complex and compelling memoir requiring a slow and patient read.

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In this small volume, Nawrocki (Four Blue Eggs, 2014) looks back at one year of her life—the six months she spent in a coma at age 19 and her half year in rehabilitation.

Early on, the author asks: “How can I write a memoir about events for which I have no memory?” Six months of her life were lost to a mysterious viral encephalitis that wracked her body and mind, and now she is determined to make sense of the time and the events that almost took her life. She is trying to understand the coma from the inside but has only outside information in her toolbox. She shares her journal entries from her first year at Sarah Lawrence, wondering whether these are the poetic, emotionally fraught musings of a typical freshman or the signs that some illness was already lurking, ready to take her down. She scours medical records, detailing the myriad tests and ambiguous conclusions. She knows but does not remember that she fell ill in the beginning of June. In August, the medical team at Yale New Haven Hospital wanted to do an open brain biopsy. Fortunately, her cousin Nancy, a doctor, stepped in: “Amy was a poet before she got sick, and when she gets better, I think she might need that piece of frontal lobe,” she told the team. Indeed, Nawrocki is a poet, and her writings, in her journals and in this memoir, are filled with vivid metaphors: “We all have wished to dream ourselves beyond the stratosphere, to rocket past the Oort cloud and hitch a ride on a revolving arm of the galaxy.” The basic, provocative question posed throughout this text is: what is memory? Is it the imprint on the brain of actual experiences, or the sum construct of experience, pieces learned from photographs, and the recollections of others? Nawrocki’s prose is often lyrical, but her musings are sometimes confounding, especially the passages written before her illness: “Palm strike to the face...I’m tired of this now that ebb tides the flow.” Still, this account is ultimately captivating, rewarding readers who finish the intricate book.

A complex and compelling memoir requiring a slow and patient read.

Pub Date: April 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-947003-61-3

Page Count: 68

Publisher: Little Bound Books

Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)